XING started showing ads on personal profile pages. That resulted in a heated and intense debate in the German section of the Xing forum. Little trickled over into the English section which is strange. Xing claims to be international, yet the company management ignores the discussion in English. Instead Lars Hinrichs posted at the OpenBC blog, Serving Our Members Better, out of reach for most members and more like an announcement.
Basically the complaints are that since XING did an IPO (sold shares) they have put members in the back seat and focus on ways to raise profits even if those ways are not member-friendly. In this case with ads people noticed that ads for competitors turned up on your profile page, hardly what members want. XING did backtrack and created an opt-out for premium (paying) members who can select to drop ads. But the opt-out means many premium members will not notice and have to have the ads showing up.
Update from a post in the XING blog on January 6:
Since Saturday January 5, 2008, no online ads have been featured on any profiles of Premium Members. This is in response to the continuing feedback XING has received, which clearly shows that the majority of our Premium members do not wish to have online ads on their profiles when viewed by basic members. We very much regret that we misjudged the situation. And for this we would like to offer our apologies.
This move means that Premium Members are exempt from all advertising on the XING platform – both in terms of their own profile page and their general user experience on the XING platform. Basic members will continue to see ad banners on their start page, on profiles of other basic members, the search and search results pages, and other parts of the platform.
This means that premium members luckily are back to square one, no ads. And hopefully XING learned a lesson about how not to treat paying members.
